LOCKED IN HER ROOM AGAIN, Lily lies on the bed, her hand on her stomach. She’s supposed to be figuring out the location of the hidden room. But she only told him that to get him to leave. What’s the point in trying? She’ll die whatever happens. Either she’ll locate the room, and then Tom will kill her, or she’ll refuse and then he’ll kill her. Tom would then paint himself as a hero to the police, and Isabelle would probably sign the house over to him.
All Lily has achieved at Endgame is to get people killed and help a killer. She should never have trusted anyone. She should have stayed in the maze that never let her go and waited for a snow shroud.
Outside, the frosted wind moans as it rushes past Lily’s window. The curtains are open, showing windows covered with snowflakes that look like hardanger lace.
And then she gets that same tickle, the feeling of a memory settling on her.
Something to do with lace. The campfire conversation not long before she died. She closes her eyes to replay the scene and the words weave back to her. ‘Some people seem as fragile as lace,’ Mum had said, staring at Uncle Edward and Aunt Veronica, ‘but if it’s made of hardanger, it’ll lead them through whatever they need to do.’
Veronica had then walked over and bent down to whisper in Mum’s ear. It’s loud enough, though, for Lily to hear. Never underestimate children. ‘Liliana is opposing our plans for the hotel and persuading the board,’ Veronica had said. ‘We’d like you to vote against her.’
Mum had shaken her head. Veronica then looked at Lily, and bent closer to Mum. Lily couldn’t hear what she said, but it made Mum grab hold of Lily and hold her tight.
Veronica’s face when she walked away was one of hard anger.
Her and Edward’s hard anger had killed Mum. As a result, Liliana’s hard anger led her to kill her own brother and sister-in-law, which ultimately led to her death. Tom and Sara’s hard anger had seen them through murder.
Lily’s hard anger, however, would keep her and little Bean alive, and stop Tom getting his hands on this house.
Sweeping her legs off the bed, Lily gets up and arranges all the sonnet clues next to each other on the floor. There’s a thread that runs through them – Liliana would have made sure of that – she just has to find it, and pull.
Scrabbling in her bag, she gets out the letter Liliana had written to her. She reads it again, and stops at a line that tickles. ‘They will be there, in every clue: the beginning and end of all that has haunted our family for so many years.’ That’s repeated in one of the sonnets, she’s sure of it. Skimming through the poems, she finds it – the couplet of the Boxing Day sonnet: ‘At great volume, you’ll cry/The beginning and end mark of the line.’
Does this mean the beginning and end of the bloodline? Is she thinking of Lily’s baby, of Bean? But what then would be the beginning? Or what if it means line as in verse?
Adrenaline coursing, Lily writes down the first and last letter, the ‘mark’, of the initial line of each sonnet.
Spelled out in an acrostic, one of Grandma Violet’s favourite games, is the answer to one of Endgame’s cold cases:
Elephants are said to remember, I’m
Do you feel safe? Safe as hot brandied cocoa?
We used to sing together, remember?
An owl descends, the night’s stone alibi.
Really, we should be marking Haloa,
Downstairs, today. My home is a castle!
Key clue today! Stop now and listen:
I wonder what it is to be dead. A
Like incense smoke in space, even keen prayer
Let’s call a truce, what do you say? Will no
Early in the year, possibilities
Dance, let’s, you and I, when we’re dead and gone,
EDWARD KILLED MARIAENA ROSE
Lily had known it, but she still finds herself breathing out in relief. He murdered Mariana for the house, and then Liliana killed him. But why that spelling of Mariana? It wasn’t on her birth certificate. And Liliana doesn’t make mistakes, not with words, anyway.
Lily knows by now that errors can be deliberate. She looks at the whole line where the error sits: ‘My home is a castle.’ And then she gets it. As always, she’s drawing Lily’s attention to anomalies. And this one tells her something that makes her smile. Aunt Liliana’s home was Mrs Castle. That’s what Liliana meant by the one of the clues not being a message to Lily. The last sonnet was for Mrs Castle, requesting a dance to David Bowie when they’re both dead. Modern love.
Lily can’t stop a sob this time. She stifles it, though, when she hears the key again in the lock.
‘Have you solved it yet?’ Tom says, scanning the floor with all the copies of the sonnets.
‘Only confirming that your dad killed my mum. It says it here, the first and last mark of the lines.’
Tom nods. ‘So really, what I’ve done is complete a game that started decades ago. The longest game of Monopoly not on record. And I win.’
‘Only if we find the secret room,’ Lily says.
Tom marches out the door and comes back with a sledgehammer, covered with dried blood. Lily shrinks back. ‘That’s what you used to kill Ronnie and Gray.’
‘What does it matter?’ Tom says. ‘If you can’t find the room the brainy way, then I’ll have to use old-fashioned methods.’ He swings the sledgehammer back and slams it into her wardrobe. The wood gives in, splintering and cracking.
The house creaks around them as if in fear. ‘Don’t,’ Lily says. ‘I’ll find it, I promise.’
‘I knew you wanted this place for yourself. You’re as selfish as the rest of us.’ Tom blows her a kiss and leaves, locking her in once more.
*
Bean skips in her tummy as Lily frantically goes over the sonnets. There are so many motifs running through them: music, death, singing, Bowie.
Lily stops at Bowie, as everyone always should. ‘What Would Bowie Do?’ indeed.
But what does that mean? David Bowie was an incandescent chameleon. Magnetic. He didn’t need to present any one version of himself to the world. What has Bowie got to do with Lily, here, now?
What is she not seeing? Lily pulls Christina off the bed and onto her lap. She rubs the hem of the ragdoll’s skirt between her fingers for comfort, feeling the seams that connect the old pieces of clothes together.
That’s it.
Bowie used to cut up articles, books, thoughts, anything, and randomly jumbled them to make his lyrics. Borrowing from Burroughs, he scissored words and sewed them into new interpretations.
So that’s what Lily will do.
She grabs the scissors from her desk and starts slicing up the spare sets of sonnets into pieces. ‘Let’s Dance,’ she says.